He was abandoning his own child. The realization was a physical blow. I looked at Maya. The terror in her eyes was slowly being replaced by a horrifying, devastating clarity. The man she loved was a monster.
I couldn’t let him leave with the money. If he vanished, the syndicate would come after the company—after me. And they would slaughter Maya and Leo to tie up loose ends.
I gently pushed Maya back behind the hanging coats. I took a deep breath, smoothing down my navy silk dress, and pushed the closet door open.
“She’s not coming with you, Richard,” I said, stepping into the dim light.
Richard spun around, leveling the gun at my chest. When he saw it was me, his jaw dropped. The gun wavered. “Eleanor? How did you…”
“Your black card declined, remember?” I said coldly, walking slowly toward him. “You’ve always been sloppy. Did you really think you could borrow eight million from the Volkovs and I wouldn’t notice the margin calls?”
His eyes darted nervously. “You don’t understand. I had a plan. The tech merger was supposed to cover it! You ruined everything by freezing the accounts tonight! You killed me, Eleanor!”
“You dug your own grave,” I countered, stopping ten feet from him. “And you used a fake one for me to trap a young girl.”
Richard sneered, regaining a fraction of his old arrogance. “Maya is a naive idiot. She was just a place to keep my offshore assets. But you, Eleanor… you’re smart. You’re going to wire the eight million to my account right now, or I swear to God, I’ll pull this trigger.”
“No, you won’t,” a voice said from the doorway.
We both turned. Vanessa stood there, shivering in her evening gown, holding a heavy manila envelope. But she wasn’t looking at Richard with love. She was looking at him with pure venom.
“He’s not going to shoot you, Eleanor,” Vanessa said, stepping into the room. “Because he needs you to decipher the ledger I just stole from his safe.”
Richard paled, the gun dropping slightly as he stared at Vanessa. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at the hotel!”
Vanessa let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “Waiting for you? While your cards declined and you fled your own birthday party? I’m not a fool, Richard. The moment you bolted, I went to your private safe at the office. The one you thought I didn’t have the combination to.”
She threw the manila envelope onto the floor between us.
“I thought it would be stock certificates,” Vanessa sneered, her perfect composure finally cracking. “But it’s a burn book. He didn’t just steal from the Russians, Eleanor. He’s been stealing from the employee pension fund for five years. My pension. Everyone’s pension.”
I felt the air leave my lungs. Embezzling corporate profits was a white-collar crime; stealing the pensions of hundreds of hardworking people was a destruction of lives.
“Shut up!” Richard screamed, pointing the gun at Vanessa now. “Both of you, shut up! I built that company! You were just the wallet, Eleanor, and you were just the face, Vanessa! I was the brains!”
“You’re a parasite,” I said, my voice dangerously low. “You’ve never built a thing in your life. You only know how to feed.”
Richard’s face contorted in rage. He raised the gun, aiming it squarely at my head. “Wire the money, Eleanor. Now. Or I put a bullet in you and tell the Russians Vanessa did it.”
Before I could reach for my phone, a small, terrified voice broke the tension.
“Daddy?”
We all froze. Leo was standing in the doorway of the closet, clutching his toy sailboat, tears streaming down his face. Maya rushed out behind him, grabbing him desperately.
Richard stared at his son. For one second, I thought I saw a flicker of humanity in his eyes, a momentary realization of the monster he had become. But then, his grip tightened on the gun.
“Get him out of here, Maya,” Richard snapped coldly. “Before he sees something messy.”
That was the breaking point. Maya didn’t shrink back. She didn’t cower. She stood up, her face hardening into stone.
“You’re dead to us,” she said.
Before Richard could react, the screech of tires echoed from the driveway. Heavy doors slammed. Gruff voices shouted in Russian. The Volkov syndicate had arrived.
Richard panicked. He grabbed the duffel bag of cash, completely ignoring us, and bolted for the glass sliding doors leading to the balcony.
“He’s going for the cliffside stairs!” Vanessa yelled.
Richard smashed the glass with the butt of his gun and scrambled out into the darkness. I ran to the shattered doorway, looking down. But I wasn’t looking at Richard fleeing.
